


the price not of peace, but of cradling

by detainyou



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: (i'm working on a fic novel with my witchwife), Age Difference, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Hero Worship, POC Vimes, Self Confidence Issues, Unresolved Sexual Tension, What Have I Done, also young sam is in this but he's like a tiny bab, but this is my first posted thing sooo, hobbies include: crying about vimes, inevitably my first fic in any fandom is like, lol i mean literally everything is unresolved, ouch my heart, sybil is in this briefly also, takes place immediately after Night Watch, technically not my first fic in this fandom, time travel paradoxes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2018-03-16 02:40:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3471332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/detainyou/pseuds/detainyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If he focused hard, put recent not-recent events out of his mind and cast his memory back to when he new to the Watch, he could spot the differences clearly.  And in these moments he longed for sleep, longed to not feel that pang of emptiness as he saw the coffins lowered, that buzz of panic roaring through his veins, what do I do, what can I possibly do now he's gone?</p>
            </blockquote>





	the price not of peace, but of cradling

When one has just taken apart a major historical event which one learned about in history books as a child, there is a great deal of sorting-out to do with regard to where one's head is, how time continues to move, and what truly happened when.

Vimes was not cut out for this, he decided. It had been bad enough when it was unfolding all around him, roiling along the streets in an unstoppable flood. But now it was meant to be tucked away all tidily in his mind. For whom, really, could he tell? He'd told Sybil, of course—she had been terribly interested, and it was more fun than doing the crossword while she recovered from bringing Young Sam into the world. Being told a complicated story meant that she had Vimes to herself, and he had her full attention as much as she had his, which was a great comfort to her when she couldn't get on with her usual bustling around. It also meant that he actually sat down for awhile, and ate properly, and now and then he slept.

_He had been there,_ Vimes thought now, turning the concept over in his mind. He, Vimes, had met himself, and that still baffled him. He didn't think he could ever get used to it. And what was worse—now, after the fact, home and dry and as safe as he ever was—was that his memories were _different_. The mist-tinted memories he had made when he was young, that is, not the new ones fresh and raw like a wound on his mind. But... the old ones, inexplicably, were new. The past he carried with him through the time shift had been crinkled and worn through, and in places he had stepped on it, and torn pieces off, so by the time he had a moment to look back at it, _really_ look at it up close, it was not the same past at all. Vimes had spent so much of his recent... misplacement worrying about the future getting kicked in beyond repair. He hadn't even thought to ask what would happen to history now that he'd tracked his muddy boots across the damned thing. He'd _worried_ , but he hadn't asked.

But he remembered. If he focused hard, put recent not-recent events out of his mind and cast his memory back to when he new to the Watch, he could spot the differences clearly. And in these moments he longed for sleep, longed to not feel that pang of emptiness as he saw the coffins lowered, that buzz of panic roaring through his veins, _what do I do, what can I possibly do now he's gone?_

 

He spent much of the first week of his child's life staring. Vimes stared at Young Sam while he slept, while he ate, while Sybil put tiny unnecessary shoes on him. Vimes held him, too, very carefully, as if the infant were one of those immensely delicate decorative eggs with patterns poked through with pins, or a holy relic, or a particularly sensitive bomb. Young Sam's eyes didn't quite focus yet, and his tiny fingernails could have cut glass, if only by accident. He was small and wrinkly and his tummy stuck out like a toad's. Vimes wondered whether this was the default human condition: feeble, hungry, confused. You came in that way and went out that way, in Vimes' experience, whether you lived to see old age or not.

He marveled at the smell of the crown of Young Sam's head. It wasn't a soap smell because despite being otherwise wholeheartedly in support of disinfectant, Dr Lawn had said to only bathe Young Sam with clear water for the first little while. Something about tiny protective bugs, he'd said, helped with immunity. Yet, though he'd never had a proper bath in his life, Young Sam's head smelled of sweets. Milky caramels, Vimes thought. He used to save up mites and elims all month for just one small snip off the giant chewy block of the stuff from a poky little confectioner's shop in the Shades.

He had saved up a very long time for this.

 

Now Vimes stared into the slightly-warped mirror as he shaved. No Willikins reading out the paper, today; Sybil had insisted that if Vimes was going to take time off, he could catch up with current events as soon as he was back to work and not a minute before. Everyone said he needed rest, needed time to grow used to having a child. And that was all right. But time off meant more time in the depths of his own head, picking things apart, going over old ground. Remembering.

Somewhere, as if through fog, he could see Keel's face, the Keel Vimes had known before. The still-healing scar was in the same place and at precisely the same angle, it was true, but he looked very little like Vimes. This was a fact that he clung to.

And then he tried to remember Keel's face through his own young eyes, remember words Vimes had said to Sam instead of things Vimes remembered Keel telling him, and there...  _there_ was the raised bit of the surface, like the mending of cracked plaster. As uniform and smoothly integrated as possible, but you could still tell it was new.

The real Sergeant Keel,  _his_ Keel, still existed, because Vimes had seen his body, cold and kept safe just for the occasion of Vimes' departure. Dead and given a hero's burial.  _But_ .

Had it  _always_ happened like this? In whatever possible universes the monks had spoken of? Had he gone through his life with this mist-shrouded memory of Keel because it hadn't happened, or it was going to happen before but hadn't yet? Had he always been taught how to be himself by  _himself_ ? Gods, it was all so technical and twisty. Vimes didn't like it one bit.

And as he looked in the shaving mirror now, trying to look with the eyes of his youth, he saw  _his_ Keel looking back at him.

Vimes tried not to think of Keel as being gone.

 

Sybil had shooed him away for awhile, and so Vimes had gone out into the garden. No assassins skittered across the loose tiles today. The air was cool, and fat white clouds sat utterly stationary in the sky, tinted only a little bit yellow by the city's airborne contributions.

Vimes sank into a chair on the patio and closed his eyes.

 

Lance-Constable Sam Vimes opened his eyes.

It had been a funeral. Not much else could be said. He had not been to very many until recently, and now he had been to more than he thought he could stand. Every single one of the fallen, every life lost in the Revolution, Sam Vimes attended their burial. Watchmen, shopkeepers, soldiers, even Carcer's men, Sam went to see them all off. He wanted to remember that this was what happened when bad men were allowed to do what they wanted—it wasn't just good people who died, it could be _anybody_. You couldn't decide who deserved death or not, Sam felt; that was for the Law to decide. But when the wheels of evil turned, it did not stop to ask if a grain was good or bad before grinding it to dust. Sam needed to remember this. This was the price not of peace, but of cradling the aggressive, hungry, tired city against your chest even as it struggled, and making sure it could sleep.

And now, if Sam Vimes saw one more box lowered into the ground, heard once again the  _ptptdd_ of soil hit the lid with hollow finality, he swore that something inside him would smash and catch alight like a firebomb, and once that happened nothing could put it out again. Keel had told him to keep it in, keep it chained—whatever  _it_ was. Anger, he supposed Keel had meant. But it felt  _more_ than anger, more than sadness or rage or terror. Sam knew he probably didn't understand what justice was, not at his age, but now he could recognize the shape of a space where it  _wasn't_ . And when he saw it, when it hit him, something awoke in the cage of his ribs and pounded to get out. There was a monster in there, and Keel had seen it. Sam hadn't been able to hide anything from him. Hadn't  _wanted_ to.

He remembered when the sergeant had leaned against the wall and slept, while ahead of them people queued up for Victory Stew. Sam had tried to eat but was too keyed up, so instead he watched the sergeant. Guarded him. Sam wasn't sure what from, but he  _knew_ that Sergeant-at-Arms John Keel was a Good Man, and short of velvet ropes and a polished glass case, the least Sam could do to keep people from disrupting Keel's Goodness with their common nastiness was make sure his sergeant got a decent nap.

There was a solidity to John Keel that Sam liked. Not solid like Fred Colon—Keel wasn't a large man, more of a wiry one. Not tall but still taller than Sam, muscular round the calves and arms but without the sort of chiseled midsection that came embossed on a Day Watch breastplate. Keel looked  _comfortable_ , that was it—his limbs knew their jobs and did them, and the rest had filled in some, probably over many years of effort. Sam knew the way a skinny person walked because he was one; rail-thin was still in Keel somewhere, under what seemed like relatively recent feeding-up. His bones knew to bunch in tight to avoid banging on things, because when you've been all bones you know not to expect anything to soften the blow.

Keel's coloring ran toward the darker end of the standard Ankh-Morpork spectrum, and Sam felt a solidarity with him for that. In a city where blond was about as rare as solid gold and just as highly-prized, being a brown kid with brown eyes and brown hair was as common as mud, and just as likely to be left on the doorstep without a thought. People didn't notice you much when you looked like that, unless you had charisma or were particularly bad at nicking stuff. Sam's mother always told him,  _Your father was a handsome man and you've got his chin and his freckles_ , but Sam thought it would have been much more helpful if, instead of his chin, he had inherited his father's oft-mentioned blue eyes, or his ruddy-chestnut hair, maybe the sharp nose as well, and the high forehead for good measure. What good was a bloody  _chin_ , for gods' sake? Practically everybody had a chin unless they were rich, and they didn't look much different across the board. And anybody could get freckles, too—all you had to do was walk behind a cart along a pitted street after a grimy rain.

But then there was Keel, with features like Sam's, and Sam felt a whole lot better about it. He could only hope that he would grow up to look like that, all strong and quick and  _tough_ , with that little half-mouth smile when he figured something out.

Watching his sergeant sleep, practicing lighting matches the way Keel did, Sam had realized he had never met a good man before, not really. Meeting Keel had completely altered his opinion of them as a group, including himself.

Sam returned every week, at least once. Talked to the air, to himself perhaps, hoping that wherever Keel was—wherever Good people went—Sam's little troubles might be heard. He asked things he hadn't known to ask before, things there hadn't been time for, and waited for answers, listening to the wind. Sam waited and waited, huddled against the chill, until he knew no answers would come. Then he started telling Keel things, instead. Stupid things, rambling, unburdening the details of his night into the graveyard dirt. Things like, _I miss you._ Things like, _If there had only been more time, I would have—_ would have what? Sam didn't know.

It was possible, he now knew as he leaned against the fence of the graveyard, to set aside standards and expectations in favor of what was Right. Keel didn't seem to care what people thought of him, he just  _did_ things. Sam wished he had that kind of confidence. He wished he'd had more time to work with Keel, to drink it all in, to wear a mask of Keel's goodness while he figured out how to manufacture his own out of the scraps and rubbish he had inside.

Sam tried not to think of Keel as being dead. Oh, he had watched the coffin descend, had stood at the grave for hours afterward, come back again and again, had even cried the messy, gulping, snot-heavy weeping of someone who had run out of solemnity too long ago. He decided to keep Keel alive in himself. Keel had wanted to teach him how to be good, which meant Keel had believed Sam could learn.  _So he would keep learning_ , damn it. Without a teacher to guide him it would be a lot harder, and he would likely add innumerable guilts to his personal collection along the way, but Keel had believed in him, had  _chosen_ him, and so Sam knew he could do it. He  _had_ to.

Sam dried his eyes, fished his week's pay out of his pocket and the little extra that the lads had slipped in for him to help through the grief, pushed off from the fence and left Small Gods' cemetery. On his way back to the Watch House, he bought a packet of cigars.

 


End file.
